The director of the acclaimed and controversial Act of Killing on completing his difficult cinematic journey in Indonesia.
In 2012, director Joshua Oppenheimer released the controversial documentary titled, The Act Of Killing, taking the yearlong mass killings in Indonesia during 1965-1966 and placing them within the present. The killers, a gang of terrorists led by Anwar Congo, reenact the murdering of over half a million Indonesians. It took Oppenheimer over a decade to fully film, considering the crux of the documentary started with the victims’ families, until the killers demanded their time on camera. It’s a warped, trippy way to highlight genocide, and the film brilliantly depicts how fascination and guilt can seep into murder. While the award-winning film created a governmental stir, there’s still a lot to be done, as Oppenheimer is gearing for the release of another film, The Look Of Silence, before checking out of Indonesia for good. NO TOFU spoke with Joshua Oppenheimer on tackling such heavy topics and the effect it can have on the human spirit.
How do you manage to remain objective when filming something like The Act of Killing?
I think there’s a distance on what I’m filming which is maybe what you’re calling objectivity. That distance is a moral distance, and it is a kind of moral position. It’s a moral judgment at the very least of the crimes that unwarranted friends have committed in the past. And there’s the cowardly way in which in the present, they continue to justify those acts to themselves so that they don’t have to live with the debilitating effect of guilt. I wouldn’t say the film is objective in the literal sense—it’s beyond that. It’s the kind of film where it’s unavoidable for one to get emotionally involved with the people one films, and the things one films, and the things one witnesses while filming. This is a film on how human beings live with atrocity, how they commit atrocity, how they lie about them so they can continue to live with themselves and the effect of those lies on a whole society. To make an honest film about such things one has to start to be honest about what one sees and experiences and knows while filming. An emotional reaction. Those emotional reactions are motivating what I’m shooting and how I’m shooting. So there’s no sense in which the film is wholly objective or ever really tries to be wholly objective. In fact, I think you can’t make a good film about another human being without being really close to the person and I don’t think you can be close to anybody from a position of cold, calculating objectivity. I also think in American documentaries’ tradition, in particular—maybe because in so many ways we have so many accumulated injustices in our country—we look to documentary filmmakers to be our investigators, prosecutors and judges. I think that’s understandable given the inadequacy of investigative journalism in the United States and given the inadequacy of our judicial system and responding to some of the worst crimes in our history, including very recent ones, with torture, but that doesn’t make for good filmmaking and it’s not the task of a filmmaker to primarily deliver a verdict.
The documentary also shows a warped obsession with Hollywood.
Anwar talks about a very important part of how he was able to kill in the past, having used cinema as a means of escaping the reality of what he was doing, while he was doing it. He talks about coming out of the cinema feeling intoxicated by his love of Elvis Presley, for example, and then dances across the street happily killing people. There you see cinema as an agent of escape. It’s actually what’s most dangerous about cinema and commercialized culture, where culture is basically a vehicle for escape. You can see in this example, which is horrible to the point of allegory, how cinema has helped Anwar kill. Both by providing him methods of killing but also by providing him with a way of distancing himself from what he was doing when he was doing it. Having said that, I don’t think that The Act of Killing is making any kind of point that the violence that we see glamorized in Hollywood film is responsible for real world violence. I don’t think on screen violence causes real world violence. The Act of Killing is a film fundamentally about denial and the terrible consequences of denial. Escapist fantasy is but one form of denial.
What drew you to want to document this?
Well, I began this project in collaboration with survivors of the 1965 genocide. I helped a community of plantation workers make a film documenting and dramatizing their struggle to organize a union in the immediate aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship, under which unions were illegal. When we were making that film, it turns out that the biggest obstacle they had in organizing a union was fear. Fear because their parents and grandparents who had been in a strong plantation workers’ union until 1965, had been accused of being communist sympathizers, simply for being in the union, and then had been killed for it. They were afraid to very openly organize a union and they really desperately needed a union. The workers who were making the film faced really terrible conditions. They were spraying a weed killer with no protective clothing. The mist was getting into their lungs and then into their blood streams and then into their livers and dissolving their liver tissue and killing the women workers who sprayed the stuff, in their ‘40s. When they would so much as file a petition with the company to request protective clothing, masks and gloves for example, the company would hire, in order to physically attack them and threaten them with even bigger attacks. After the plantation workers had made that film, they said “Come back and let’s make another film together right away about why we are afraid about what it’s like for us to live in 2002 with the perpetrators all around us still in positions of power and consequently what it’s like to live with the fear that the perpetrators can do this to us again at any time.” I went back immediately to do that work in early 2003. As soon as I arrived back in Indonesia, within weeks or days of starting, the army found out what we were up to and threatened the survivors not to participate in the film. The survivor then said, “Joshua, before you quit and give up and go back home why don’t you try and film the perpetrators? See if they will tell you how they killed our relatives.” I didn’t know if it was safe to approach the perpetrators at all. In fact, I was afraid to do so, but when I did, I found to my horror that every single one of them were immediately boastful, immediately open about the worst kept details of the killings. Which they would recount in front of their families, their small children and the children would look on board, they heard the stories many times before. In that moment I had the awful feeling that I wandered into Germany forty years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power and I knew that I would spend as many years as it would take to address this situation of impunity. Then I spent two years feeling entrusted by the survivors to do the work that they clearly couldn’t do themselves in collaboration with the survivors. I spent two years filming every perpetrator I could find across North Sumatra. Anwar was the 41st perpetrator I met at the end of that two-year period. I lingered on him because I felt that somehow his pain was close to the surface. He was unable to wholly deny what he really felt about what he had done. I came to wonder if maybe the boasting that I spent two years filming may not have been a sign of pride at all. But it was instead a desperate attempt for Anwar to deny the real meaning of what he had done. I spent five years filming with Anwar and 1,200 hours later, we had filmed the material that eventually became The Act of Killing. The beginning of the film where Anwar takes me to the roof and shows how he kills with wire and dances the cha-cha-cha — that was the very first day I met him. That was typical of the first day of meeting a perpetrator. They would all invite me to the place where they killed, launch into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed, complain if they hadn’t brought a friend to play the victim, or a machete to use as a prop.
Wow, that is unreal.
The final scene in the film when Anwar returned to the roof was the very last day I filmed Anwar, thousands of hours of footage and five years later. Anwar — and I are still in touch every three to four weeks or so. I think we’ll always be in touch. When he saw the completed version of the film, he said, “Josh, this film shows what it’s like to be me, and I’m relieved to finally have been shown what these events have meant and not nearly what I have done.”
As a creator, where do you go from here?
Well, The Act of Killing is only the first half of my work on Indonesia, the second film we’re mixing [The Look of Silence] right now. It’s also about the 1965 genocide from the perspective of the survivors. Although it doesn’t involve the kind of flamboyant genre-inspired dramatization that The Act of Killing does. It’s about a family of survivors who found out who killed their son through the first 40 perpetrators that I filmed before I met Anwar. The youngest brother, born after the killing, is much younger than his oldest brother who was killed. He was conceived by his mother as a replacement for her dead son. So by having Ari, the main character, the mother said she could continue living and not lose her mind. Ari grew up with the burden of that. He’s not much older than me, he has children of his own, who are in school and they are being brainwashed that all of this was their fault. Meanwhile his older siblings and his parents are traumatized about what happened and he finds this ultimately unbearable and he goes and he confronts all of the men involved in his brother’s murder and these confrontations are unimaginable.
Is it safe to say that after this, your work is done in Indonesia?
After I make this film, The Look of Silence, I suppose I won’t be making any more films in Indonesia, because I cannot safely return to Indonesia. I feel like the work that Indonesians are doing with The Act of Killing that’s been transformative will continue—and not only continue, but will become that much stronger as The Look of Silence now arrives. The Act of Killing is a real dark image of a contemporary Indonesia seen through a dark mirror. The Look of Silence somehow gives you a haunted feeling on what it would be like to be an ordinary person, let alone a survivor in that society. So I think that the new film will help take the debate inside of Indonesia to a whole new level and I will of course, as I release the film, do anything that I can to support that.
Did this experience take an emotional toll on you?
Yes. There’s a scene in the longer cut of the film where Anwar shows how he might have killed a child by butchering the teddy bear. When I was shooting that scene, I did have a cinematographer with me. It started as a joke—an improvisation, a game really. I picked up the camera because I could see that something serious was kind of happening there, but it wasn’t something we had planned to film. I was the one holding the camera, and I was a couple of yards away from Anwar throughout the whole scene. I see his microphone dropping against his shirt and I had to adjust his microphone. As I was doing that, Anwar said, “Josh, you’re crying.” It’s the only time in my life that I ever cried crying without realizing it. I noticed I was and I remember just saying, “I am.” Anwar said, “What should we do?” and I said, “Well we better continue.” I remember going home that night and feeling so tainted trying to depict the horror of what happens when a million people are killed and when the trauma is just almost cultivated into the present keeping everyone afraid and no one comes to terms with what is done. I felt filthy even shooting that scene, even making this film. I went home that night and I had terrible nightmares and it was the beginning of eight months of terrible nightmares and really bad insomnia. So, absolutely, it took a toll. At the same time, working with my Indonesian crew was a blessing, they were among the most brave and loving and wonderful people I’ve ever known and committed—these people gave eight years of their lives, changed their careers, risked their safety hoping there would be real change in Indonesia. They couldn’t put their names on their work, they couldn’t take credit for their own work. They gave up careers as University professors, directors of Human Rights Organizations, environmental activists, heads of regional offices of Indonesian Legal Aid, sothey were already an established and impressive bunch of people before they even started working on The Act of Killing. They gave that up because they wanted to do this work. So I feel very fortunate and very honored to have been able to make this journey.